Global order is entering harder and more troubled times. Many are talking about the return of geopolitics. Others stress the inequalities and instabilities of global capitalism and the revival of geo-economic pressures and tensions. It is not difficult to point to local or regional crises. Nor is it hard to find examples of ineffective institutions, regionally and globally. But do the dots join up? And, if they do, what is the bigger picture that emerges? Are there thresholds of violence, or synergies of dysfunction, or cross-cutting cleavages that affect how we understand global order and how we see the links between the regional and the global?

This lecture will address these question -- by insisting on the need to look back beyond the post-Cold War period; by unpacking the sources of politicization and contestation; and by questioning the still powerful western narratives of global progress and integration. It will stress how answers to the question of the decline of US hegemony or the revisionism of emerging powers take on very different meanings in different parts of the world. And it is will argue that the most important mistake is to interpret the challenge of global order in terms of simple movement from the liberal hopes of the 1990s to the return of realist power-politics in the following decade. The major policy and analytical challenges have to do with the links between international politics and global capitalism and with how global governance institutions and power-political ordering relate to each other.

Andrew Hurrell is the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations and Fellow of Balliol College at the University of Oxford. He was elected to the British Academy in 2011. He is visiting ANU on 20-24 April as the APCD-SDSC Distinguished Visitor. His latest book, On Global Order. Power, Values and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford University Press, 2008) won the International Studies Association Prize for Best Book in the field of Inter national Relations in 2009. Other publications include: (with Ngaire Woods), Inequality, Globalization and World Politics (1999); and (with Louise Fawcett), Regionalism in World Politics (1995). He was named in the 2011 Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey as one of top twenty academics to have made the most influential contribution to IR over the previous five years, and was one of only two non-US based academics in that group. His current work focuses on emerging powers and the globalization of international society. He is also completing a short introduction to global governance, forthcoming with OUP.

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